From Humble Beginnings to an Industry Leader

C. Valley Paving
Written by Ryan Cartner

C. Valley Paving is a Canadian paving company with more than thirty-five years of experience serving Toronto and the surrounding area as far south as Southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe. Providing paving services to the commercial, industrial, residential, and municipal sectors, C. Valley has developed a strong reputation and built many long-standing business relationships with some of the largest organizations in its operating territory.
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The company was established in 1982 and since that time it has grown to be a leader in the region. C. Valley’s continual success results from a combination of the expertise that can be found in the ranks of the staff, a rich portfolio of projects demonstrating the quality of its workmanship, and a commitment to continual growth and improvement. C. Valley Paving is a top choice paving company for home builders, contractors, property managers, and municipalities throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

The company grew from humble roots, founded by two hopeful entrepreneurs operating out of a small basement; Carmelo Calabro and Vince Borzellino are still both involved in the company’s operation along with their current partners. Today they have a team of more than sixty talented and very dedicated employees. C. Valley’s management team consists of a number of long-tenured workers who are passionate about the work they do and who are heavily invested in the success of the company. C. Valley’s leadership believes that its reputation and the confidence its customers have in its capacity to deliver on promises is a direct result of the quality of its people and their commitment to customer service.

In order to optimize efficiency and provide the best possible service to customers, in 2014 C. Valley Paving opened an asphalt manufacturing plant in Woodbridge, Ontario, just north of Toronto. Asphalt concrete is a composite material made by combining asphalt tar and mineral aggregate. There are many different mixtures with varied properties, each with its own unique advantages and disadvantages, and each suited to different applications, and getting the right mix is key to generating a high quality result.

With three decades of experience and the guidance of an expert team, the company has gained a clear understanding of what makes a long lasting, high-performing asphalt mix. Having this expertise at hand prompted the company to begin leveraging its knowledge by setting up a factory and manufacturing its own product. C. Valley now has complete control over the quality of the asphalt it uses, which means that the company can produce the material that will have the best possible results and meet the highest standards in the industry.

Building a facility to manufacture its own asphalt is one example of how C. Valley is committed to investing in its own continuous improvement. Another example can be seen in the size and quality of its equipment. The company has a fleet of dozens of trucks and machines for every aspect of a paving project. Many of these represent the industry’s state of the art. C. Valley is dedicated to on-time delivery of top performing results, and it has invested the capital to back up that promise. The company is fully equipped to handle projects of any size, often multiple projects at once. A promotional video on its website demonstrates this capacity, with an example showing C. Valley workers completing three major jobs in parallel and delivering all three in a single day.

The first of these three projects had the C. Valley team paving residential driveways. They completed seventy townhomes and thirty detached lots, totalling 460 tonnes of asphalt over 3,700 m2. For the second project, the company paved four walkways in Brampton, Ontario totalling 1,800 m2 and 340 tonnes of asphalt. The third was the largest of all, requiring 700 tonnes of asphalt to topcoat 7,530 m2 of parking lot. All of these three projects are large in scale and completing any one of them in one day presents challenges. C. Valley Paving completed all three simultaneously, delivering them all same-day, on schedule, on budget, and to the highest quality. This example is representative of the scope of work that C. Valley Paving takes on regularly.

In its earliest days, C. Valley cut its teeth on driveway paving jobs for homeowners, and its residential portfolio eventually grew to include work for home builders and developers working on large-scale subdivision projects. The company made a name for itself by focusing on quality and delivery, and that reputation grew over many successful projects across the company’s lifetime. Today C. Valley is known as a reliable paving service for residential projects at any scale. Entire subdivisions, sometimes up to 100 driveways in a day, are delivered on time, on budget, and with no sacrifice to quality. This is a capacity unrivalled by competing companies in the region.

Commercial and industrial customers depend on open communication and absolute transparency throughout a project in order to either keep everything synchronized and properly managed with the rest of their build process, or to minimize disruption and inconvenience to their regular operation. C. Valley Paving has designed its procedures around accommodating these more complex projects by assigning a dedicated team member to work closely with the customer throughout the entire process, from the initial drawings through to completion. Flexible scheduling is also very important on these large-scale projects. C. Valley often works outside of regular operating hours in order to accommodate challenging deadlines and to minimize downtime. The company understands the value of keeping the customer in the loop in order to eliminate delays. As a result, it has an excellent track record for on-time delivery.

The company is a trusted partner for municipalities across Ontario. C. Valley has substantial experience in the construction of parking lots and the reconstruction of roadways, as well as in patching potholes and emergency repairs. These are necessary services for being able to meet the needs of municipal projects, and C. Valley has focused a great deal of effort on developing this aspect of its offering. As a result, the company has delivered many municipal projects frequently valued at millions of dollars.

In order to win municipal paving projects, a company must be strictly compliant to regulations. This means that everyone involved must be diligent in employing industry-recognized best practices throughout the operation, and particularly when it comes to health and safety. To this end, C. Valley Paving employees are all thoroughly trained on safety compliance and certified in a number of key areas. They all attend a standard safety orientation, where they are trained on general job site safety, the policies of the company, legislative requirements, and the risks involved in the work they do. They take a Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) course where they learn about the proper handling and disposal of hazardous materials. In C. Valley’s case, the use of bitumen in asphalt concrete and certain sealing chemicals, among other materials, are all addressed.

Employees are trained on the safe operation of the machinery that they use including asphalt spreaders, skid steers, and rollers. This includes safe loading and unloading of heavy equipment such as dump trucks, mixers, and other necessary paving equipment and confined space training where employees learn how to avoid injury when entering a space with limited or restricted entry. In order to be prepared when injuries do happen, all employees are also trained in first aid and CPR. For roadway projects, employees are trained in traffic control and the use of warning signage, cones, barriers, and other mechanisms to keep work zones and vehicles separate. Safety is a top priority at C. Valley Paving, and there is no one with a more profound understanding of its importance than the company’s co-founder Carmelo Calabro.

In September of 2015, Calabro was seriously injured by a six-ton skid steer, an accident that nearly cost him his life. As he explained in an interview with City Life, his injuries were so severe that he underwent emergency surgery to repair his feet, ankles, legs, pelvis, ribs, lung, arm, cheeks, and his right eye. Against all odds, Calabro survived with an elevated respect for job site safety, and for the life he nearly lost.

Calabro and his partner Vince Borzellino built C. Valley Paving from a humble two-man startup into a well-known, highly successful paving company, an endeavour that demanded a commitment to hard work and an optimistic outlook. Calabro’s recovery is a reflection of the work ethic that helped to enable the success of their legacy. Though his circumstances were incredibly dire, within two months he had relearned to walk and within six he was cycling a marathon for charity.

Since the accident, cycling has become an important pastime for Calabro. Along with a group of marathon cyclers known as Team Revolution, he helped raise 1.8 million dollars for various charitable causes. These include the Humber River Hospital Foundation, the Mackenzie Vaughan Hospital, and Sunnybrook Health Science Centre’s “Project Saving Legs,” a facility focused on treating diabetic foot ulcers to prevent the need for amputation.

Carmelo Calabro survived a harrowing catastrophe and came away with a fresh new outlook and a desire to give back to the community. The health and safety of the C. Valley Paving team has always been of the utmost importance to the company’s leadership, but in the wake of such events, even further measures have been taken. Currently the company is in the process of acquiring a Certificate of Recognition (COR).

The COR program is a health and safety certification that looks at a company’s procedures and determines whether or not they align with national safety standards. Being accredited by the COR program will help C. Valley ensure that it is doing everything within its power to keep employees protected from accidents and injuries. It will also work toward opening doors to more opportunities as many project developers, in both the public and private sectors, are beginning to require that a prospective company has COR certification in order to qualify for the job.

The certification program is run by the Canadian Federation of Construction Safety Associations (CFCSA), and is nationally recognized. C. Valley Paving is en route to achieving this next step in its journey toward operating as safely as possible, and while the program demands the utmost diligence to ensure that the standards are met, C. Valley Paving is confident and excited.

One of the most significant challenges facing C. Valley and companies throughout North America that depend on skilled labour is a shortage of qualified people available to do the work. As fewer and fewer people take apprenticeships or join the trades after school, the labour pool continues to dwindle. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, the percentage of unfulfilled jobs in Ontario is 3.2 percent, which works out to 164,000 unfulfilled jobs, with the construction industry ranked as one of the most affected sectors.

C. Valley Paving is a top tier company that treats its employees fairly, takes on challenging and interesting projects, and does as much as it can to keep its workforce safe and engaged. As a result of these efforts, the company has been able to attract skilled workers and weather the labour shortage.

After thirty-five years serving the Greater Toronto Area and the Golden Horseshoe, C. Valley has earned a reputation for quality and reliability. With this much experience comes a great deal of expertise. When customers work with C. Valley Paving, they can be confident that they will enjoy a positive experience dealing with the team, quality workmanship throughout the process, and a high quality final product that will last for many years to come.

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